The new converged public network will differ from today's public network due to data demands and the economics of optical transmission. An important consideration for this new converged public network is the choice of switching technology. This choice is influenced by the increasing amount of data traffic relative to voice traffic. Data traffic will be 50 times that of voice traffic by 2003 according to one industry forecast. This will require that the architecture be optimized first for data traffic with voice being an application carried by the data network. In addition the economics of optical transmission are dictating the tradeoffs between switching, transmission and labor. According to one vendor the price/performance of optical transmission is doubling every 12 months. Distance and incremental bandwidth are becoming significantly less important in determining total life cycle cost while labor cost is increasing its impact.